It made me sick to watch a little of Texas and Notre Dame and see Charlie Strong's group effectively run what looks like the offense we used to run with a freshman quarterback. I had to turn it off it made my head hurt so badly.
I thought about this last night. Texas who was dead in the water with Charlie Strong as head coach was able to start a true fucking freshman quarterback and pretty much run OUR offense from 2013. They even had Radio be able to sub in and make things happen with his legs. They turned their offense around in one offseason after a year of complete ineptitude.
Look, I like Gus. I think he's a nice guy. But what he's doing isn't working. He had all offseason to get things back on track, to find an offensive identity, to commit to something besides a clusterfuck of moronic "packages" and substitutions.
Here's my biggest change in my opinion of Gus. I don't like the guy anymore. I don't think he's a nice guy. Nice guys don't drive a BMW i8 around a small town in Alabama, and believe me, he drives that thing like it's a regular every day car.
I think Gus came to Auburn still hungry for success and got a few big paychecks. It's Terry Bowden all over again. It's gone to his head. He probably drew up most of those plays while getting rubbed down with goats milk by a beautiful girl from Japan. Everything in his mind works out for him, and he's completely oblivious to how stupid he actually looks.
Here's the thing, though. Sometimes you have to make hard decisions. One day next week I'm going to cut a guy loose who's worked for and with me since 1999. I hate it, but I have few options left. He's done great work for me in the past, he was integral in building my business and was always on hand to do whatever. But over the last year, he's lost his way. Twice he's missed major deadlines without any warning. In July he had a significant release that he told me was handled and it failed in a major way. It was a complete debacle. He recovered and got things caught up but then Friday he left on a two-week vacation. He had five things he had to do before he left. He only did one. He failed to promote some changes that broke things all over the place and had everybody else on my staff working 16-20 hours a day trying to fix what was messed up. I like him. I like his wife and kids. It's going to make me sick to do it, but. The past is the past. I gave him more latitude than I probably would anybody else. He blew it.
Same here. It's blown. It's fucked so badly it can't be unfucked.
Barring a miraculous turnaround (that's not going to happen so we can stop wishing it would) we will be looking for a new coach in December or earlier.
The problem there is that LSU will also be looking. And as one of my LSU friends reminded me today "ours is the better job..."
And Tennessee will be looking. Texas beat Notre Dame, but if they flub through the Big 12 schedule, they might be looking. And Texas A&M might be looking.
I'm now completely on board with firing Gus as soon as possible. Auburn should never field an offense that bad. Tony Franklin was sent packing in 2008, and even that wasn't as much of a clusterfuck as what we saw on Saturday night. If our defense hadn't played lights out, that game could have easily been a 20-30 point blowout.
We nearly lost to Jacksonville State last year. We were beaten by all of our rivals AGAIN. We lost to both Mississippi schools. We nearly lost to Kentucky. Even the San Jose State game wasn't enjoyable.
2014 was overloaded with talent on offense and was stifled due to stupid play calling.
We're 3-11 against our last 14 Power 5 opponents. We're staring at 3 years in a row of losing to Georgia and Alabama. 3 of 4 years losing to LSU.
As always though, this really goes back to the man making the hires and decisions for the overall program. Jay Jacobs has to go, and the program needs a complete overhaul.
Outside of two extreme outlier seasons, Auburn has been a lower tier SEC program since 2008. We're pushing an entire decade of feeling like losers especially against our rivals.
And what sucks the most is that it didn't have to be this way. Outside of Alabama, not one team in the SEC can really put a team on the field that will be more talented than what Auburn is capable of recruiting. We will always have the players. We just need consistent coaching.
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